All those people coming into town with the same facial scars are not members of a cult after some kind of initiation ritual like they guessed. It’s actually one person. A doppelganger. And they got those scars during a battle with the party several sessions back.
The druids of the world are creating a new god, and it’s not going to be happy about the beginning stages of the industrial revolution.
That sounds awesome!
The extremely attractive and benevolent socialite with seemingly limitless wealth from mysterious sources that they are going on fetch quests for (which is about 60% of thr campaign) is actually a shapechanged amethyst dragon who is plotting an ascension ritual and is the big bad foe the campaign.
Also the seemingly benevolent order of monks are in actuality a cult for a far realm eldritch entity (a fact that only the highest ranking 5 members actually know), and the tattoo of a third eye all the acolytes get will actually anchor that entity to the world so it can come through and try to take over… but that’s next campaign.
Early on in their first game, my players suffered a T.P.K.
A squadron of horrible die rolls killed all three party members in their first battle.
I’m talking skeletons rolling nat 20s against level 3 characters who kept rolling twos and threes for the entire battle.
But they didn’t die.
Instead, they awoke to find themselves in front of the BBEG who enslaved them with a cursed crest and then sent them out to scour the world for a specific list of objects where they were contractually bound to be released once they delivered them all.
This effectively let me railroad the campaign just enough to get the party started.
(This is what I would be saying if I had realized that I could do this immediately instead of staring slackjawed in disbelief as 30 minutes into a well-planned campaign, every single party member died and then accused me of being too hard of a GM and… yeah.)
If sticking to the outcome of an extremely unlikely series of die roles is being too hard, your players are playing the wrong game.
It would have been pretty disheartening to me if that was how my first ever session went. When I started off DMing my current group 3/4 players were new to the game and I sorta made up the combat stats and rerolled some crits that would have instantly knocked a character out.
Now I’m a more strict but when they ran into the bbeg and decided to knock on their door (with a bad disguise and led by the experienced player lol) after being told not to come back. I decided not to be too hard on the players and now they aren’t really scared of the bbeg.
Choosing not to roll dice avoids needing to follow the outcome. That was a smart decision on the door knocking!
The reason for the name of their starter city, Shole
Tap for spoiler
Shithole
I have a town called “Go’way” because that’s what they told every cartographer from the closed gates.
I started a campaign of Monster of the Week, one of the players created a paranoid character who thinks society is controlled by lizards and birds are spy robots for them. So of course I immediately switched my world around, to accommodate that, except it’s not lizard people, but actually Dragons that can take human form and control birds. The game only had a couple of sessions so the group never figured that one out.
And in my current Mage campaign with a different group, they were given this amazing powerful magical wonder, and they keep using it nilly-willy, which is exactly what I expect them to do. Little do they know that it has a price, the price is not part of the current campaign though, they’re worried about other stuff, namely an enemy who they already planned 4 things to happen together, each of which would be enough to defeat him, and to make that happen they used the wonder, over and over again.
Would it not be more interesting if you dropped a hint to the party whenever they use the item that it may have a secondary effect?
Who said I haven’t?
Don’t leave us in suspense like that, what’s going to happen with the wonder?
I don’t want to give away too much, because some of the people I play with could find this (I don’t know if they use Lemmy but my nick is known and the details would be too unmistakable). But since they’re about to discover it anyways, the wonder does something, without charging the “proper” price for it, eventually they’ll start to lose control of it and it will start doing what it does to them. That should be subtle enough that even if my players find this they won’t know what’s coming but give you an idea. Hope that’s enough to satisfy your curiosity.
I always enjoy a monkey’s paw type deal. I hope your players enjoy discovering how it all goes wrong.
First time (and only time) I played, one of my group was determined to go to the hoard of monsters outside. The DM kept asking if he really wanted to do so, and he constantly said yes. Which prompted the DM to roll his little dice and make a note. That happensed about five turns, he even survived one or two turns in the middle of the hoard.
The DM kept hinting that the hoard was just a hoard and surely meant death. He kept pushing him toward the other side (I think it was a castle), but my friend was very stubborn.
It wasn’t a very long game, but it was fun. We should do that again some time.
